Friday, 1 November 2013

The Trouble with Scrum

Scrum. An iterative and incremental agile software development framework. It’s full of buzzwords. It frees us from the tyranny of waterfall development (not to say that ever existed anywhere anyway ). It’s based on the premise that the customer doesn't know what they want; we iterate quickly and deliver every sprint. We communicate with the customer often, inspect and adapt, and we build what the customer wants.

Well no. Some things don't fit into our nicely delineated sprints. Where does user experience fit into a two-week sprint? Where does architecture fit? Where does overall product quality fit in?

Stories that we can’t estimate are known as epics. According to Scrum terminology, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with epics, as long as they aren't high priority (!). We can’t directly work on epics. We can't put a story like "Fix User Experience" on the board. Project managers would go insane, blood would be spilt.

So what do we do? Well, if your experience is anything like mine then we try to break a story up into smaller bits. Perhaps we break “Great User Experience” into pithy little tasks such as "Move Button" and "Improve Dialog". Maybe the great architecture revisiting is broken into a small prod into the right direction. "Extract class for FooBar" or "Break X and Y Dependency".

Do these small tasks make sure that we get the best user experience? Do these tasks make sure that we've got an architecture to support the needs of the code over the next few months?

Of course not.

How do we make sure that cross-cutting concerns like user experience, quality and architecture are given adequate attention in an iterative development environment? I’m not sure I have the answer (I'm not sure that anyone does), but I have a suggestion.

A clearly communicated vision.

It doesn't matter whether it's user experience, product quality or software architecture. A clearly communicated vision gives you a tool for making the right decisions as you build software.

Am I suggesting the dreaded "Big Design Up Front"? No! It doesn't need all the minutiae just enough to navigate in the right direction. You might say, Just Enough Design Upfront.